He had come to the end of everything. He was cast away on what he knew to be a desolate and uninhabited coast, a hundred miles perhaps from any settlement, without food or any means of obtaining any, except the little automatic pistol in his pocket, which he hardly knew how to use. He had lost the great race, lost the emeralds, lost his life, and lost Morrison’s life, and Eva’s, too, if it happened that she had really gone on the expedition with her father.
He dragged the fire together and made it burn up. But he was too anguished now to sit still. There was a soaking fog in the air. The forest smelled of mold and death. He pushed out, blindly restless, toward the open shore again.
Out in the open he found the world full of a pale glow. The air was cloudy with fog, and a strong moon was shining through it. The crash of the surf was fainter. The wind had fallen.
Going down to the water’s edge, it seemed a long way. Out through the fog he could see the wreck of the schooner, and he wondered what optical effect of haze made it seem only a stone’s throw away. It was still spiked on its rock, but now seemed to stand in an almost vertical position, with the stern in the water. Then he grasped the fact that the tide was out.
The receding waters had left her scarcely fifty yards from shore. The waves ran with less violence now, for the barrier rocks, standing in a tall file above the surface, broke their force. And immediately Lang remembered that there was food in that schooner.
He was empty, starving. Instantly he started to wade out, bracing himself against the rollers. The shore sloped so gradually that he actually made most of the distance without going much over the waist; then it shelved suddenly, and he stumbled to his shoulders.
Treading warily for fear of a sudden plunge, he came within a fathom of the rock where the boat hung, and then the bottom went out of touch. He dipped under, but with a wallow and a few strokes he clutched the slippery edge of the crag, and got his hands on the schooner’s rail.
Easily now he pulled himself up. The schooner’s whole bottom seemed smashed out back of the bows, and a great spike of rock protruded through the hole. Everything movable in her must have tumbled down into the stern, and much of it, he was afraid, must have been washed out.
He slid down into the stern himself. Three feet of it was under water, but, as he groped down with his hands, he could feel a miscellaneous collection of loose objects—the handle of an ax, the head of a spade, and a rolling collection of tins, all mixed and tangled up with blankets, tarpaulin, his own poncho, pieces of canvas and bits of cordage. He felt several loose potatoes which he fished out and put carefully in his pockets, and then extracted other objects one by one, dripping in the pallid light
As he retrieved them he laid them in a wet blanket He secured a lump of corn bread, water soaked and uneatable, a piece of dried beef, and one by one, most precious of all, tin after tin of American canned provisions. And among these he struck upon the priceless salvage of the emergency box of matches, its top still fast waxed.